By Glen Greenwald - 26 Aug 2021
In virtually every realm of public policy, Americans embrace policies which they know will kill people, sometimes large numbers of people. They do so not because they are psychopaths but because they are rational: they assess that those deaths that will inevitably result from the policies they support are worth it in exchange for the benefits those policies provide. This rational cost-benefit analysis, even when not expressed in such explicit or crude terms, is foundational to public policy debates — except when it comes to COVID, where it has been bizarrely declared off-limits.
Read the full article at Substack
The related video:
"In virtually every aspect of public life, we make policy choices by comparing the cost and benefits of various policies. We often refuse to impose limits even though we know they would save lives: we could ban cars or make the speed limit 25 mph and save hundreds of thousands of lives. We don't because we assess that the benefits of cars outweigh the costs of those deaths. Why do we still refuse to use this analysis for COVID?"
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